One of the sad axioms of computing is that your storage requirements grow in proportion to the available hard disk space. Buy yourself a new 80Gb and before you know it, you have 80gb of photos, movies, music and, well, stuff, that’s oh-so-critical.
Quite how I coped back in my first year at University (1991-1992) with an 8086 PC with just a 3.5″ floppy is beyond me now. I even splashed out a not-insubstantial amount of money for a 20Mb hard disk card (it was huge, and plugged into the expansion slots inside: I had no onboard hard disk controller).
A similar rule applies to memory, but it’s the OS that’s the consumer. About 18 months ago when I got my 15″ Apple Powerbook, and it’s 256Mb of RAM was fine running Jaguar. As applications were installed, it seemed fine. An upgrade to Panther about a year or so ago initially made things feel faster still.
But suddenly, performance dropped. I tweaked a few things, and got some performance back. But my inexorable increase in program use, and fast-user switching meant the spinning-beach-ball-of-death became a more regular visitor as my Mac paged and thrashed the hard disk. With that on it’s last legs after a recent drop, I’ve had an annoying increase in crashes.
So, I paid a visit to Crucial, for more powerbook memory, and was relieved to find not only did the memory arrive the next day (too bad I was in London for a few days), but that it slotted in no-problem (Apple’s removable keyboard is stunningly easy to remove and the memory slots immediately and easily accessible).
Suddenly, I have a wonderfully responsive powerbook that feels like it has a new breath of life. From 256Mb to 768Mb (I bought a 512Mb module to complement my existing 256Mb module), and applications launch in no time, the beach ball of death is a fading memory, and fast-user switching is as it should be. That’s perhaps the best use of £77.54p I’ve made when it comes to technology. Touch wood too, but crashes have abated as the Hard Disk relaxes a little.
So, along with hard disk space, it seems sad that OS vendors, including Apple, just can’t help use every available scrape of memory to the detriment of the user-experience if you don’t keep up with their ever-bloating memory requirements. At work, 1-2Gb of RAM is standard on XP installations.
Is it just me, but is anybody else sentimental to programs that fitted on floppy disks along with most of your word processor files?
